An Open-Source Graphics Driver For Snapdragon

There is another new open-source Linux graphics driver entering
development and it has already showed signs of success with basic 2D acceleration
working. This new open-source driver is for Qualcomm's Snapdragon / Adreno and
who is leading the development of this driver is also quite interesting.

The Qualcomm MDP MSM8660 is one of the devices that could potentially benefit
from this open-source "Freedreno" driver initiative. [Though not this
particular phone, it suffered an untimely death during some tortuous benchmarking.]

What also makes this Snapdragon project interesting is who is
the lead developer: Rob Clark. If the name does not ring a bell, you are not
up-to-date on your Phoronix reading, but he is one of Texas Instruments' ARM
developers. He is the one that is in large part responsible for the
Texas Instruments OMAP DRM driver and through his involvement with Linaro
has been taking
part in DMA-BUF, extending
DRI2, and other efforts. While Texas Instruments' OMAP competes with Qualcomm's
Snapdragon in the ARM space, he's decided to work on reverse-engineering his competitor's
graphics core in his free time.

In his communication with me this week, Rob Clark made it quite
clear that this is solely his personal project and that he has just been doing
this reverse engineering and driver writing during his free time outside of work.
Linaro or Texas Instruments hasn't endorsed this work nor are they even aware
of it up until likely reading this article right now as he's just pushing the
Git repositories for this work today.

He ended up working on the Snapdragon as he is a fan of open-source
graphics drivers, but beyond what TI has already done for their OMAP driver, his
hands are tied. "I'd love nothing more than to be working on an [open source]
and upstream driver for the SGX GPU on OMAP platforms. But due to what I know
and have access to about the inner workings of the IMGtech GPU's, that would not
be possible without IMG's approval. I hope someday they warm up to the open source
community, but for now I am forced to look elsewhere to contribute."

He also was not sure if he would be able to contribute to the
Lima/Mali driver project because ARM is a member company of Linaro, so there might
be a conflict of interest there too. "Well, with ARM as a member company
of linaro, and coming into contact with ARM folks working on mali, as well as
engineers from other linaro member companies who use mali, it seemed like direct
contribution to the lima project might be a bit of a gray area. I don't think
I really know any internal [secrets] of how mali works (and certainly not more
than the lima guys have already figured out)."